Pride is a horrible, horrible thing

The first time Morgan kicked my ass at running, he was graceless enough, with his medal around his neck, to run back to help me over the finishing line.

He was 12, but at least I had the consolation that he was about as tall as me. In an attempt to make it competitive I'd put Eminem on my iPod and even stretched. Didn't work. He stuck with me up the first hill and, when I told him to run his own race, he took off in a cloud of imagined dust, leaving me with the vulgar lyrics of a wifebeater in my head.

The first time Ewan kicked my ass he was 11. He's half my size. We were running along chatting one minute. The next he was slowly inching off into the distance. Hah, I'll reel him back in, I thought. I was, after all, the veteran of four marathons and the proud winner of a 5k. OK, it was in South Dakota and had a field of under 30, but I still got a trophy.

(Here a lengthy aside. When I returned from Edinburgh, having run the marathon there, I proudly told Morgan, then 8, that I had finished 700th. It was my best finish, my best time, and I had the glow of pride around me.

"You mean 699 people beat you?" he asked me. That, I suppose, was one way of looking at it.

So when I won my 5k I drove home eager to show him my trophy, again the pink aura of happiness about me. "It's not very big, is it?" he said. It was true, of course - the thing was bloody miniscule - but hardly the point.)

So as Ewan faded off into the distance, I thought to myself, "Slow and steady and I'll get him back. No way he can keep up that pace." (Ah, the self-delusion of age: that my lethargic plodding could in any way be described as "pace.")

I never saw him again, until I trundled up to the car at the finish - slow and steady, very sore and very sweaty - where he and Morgan were doing sprints.



I don't consider myself a runner of any distinction. I just love it, is all. Nor am I a father who pressures his children towards wished-for sporting glory. Should they pull up lame, my first instinct is always to wince and worry if they're OK, not to deride them for being weak or to goad them onwards.

In the meantime Morgan, now 15, has run the Wellington Marathon in horrendous conditions. Ewan, now 12, ran a fast 10k on the same day.

This is all by way of saying I am in no way competitive with my sons. So why, then, did I feel a stab of unbecoming pride today on our first group train for the Round the Bays run? They both finished the run - but after me. They both did well - just not as well as me. There's a long way to go until the actual race, when they will both destroy me. But aren't we always taught to live for today - which I won?